Adventures In Homesteading (Day 16)

Hello Everyone!

Some late night writing, Oh the whining, As weird as the rest of them, Gulch explorations, Moving the cellular repeater & Electric is nice!

Alright, it is very late at night but somehow I managed to rouse myself from bed... hike across the property to my writing tent... climb up into it... and sit down to write... in an effort to stay on track with my writing routine. Which honestly, is not much of a routine yet considering that I have only been writing here over the last few days... and nothing about doing so has been on any kind of schedule.

The entire journey here so far has been an extreme test of my patience... and even my tolerance of others given how close the neighbors are, how little privacy that I have... and the constant vehicle traffic on the roads. Add into all that my elder dog whining every time I get out of her sight for ten minutes... my other dogs being stressed over all the racket around here... the chickens constantly trying to get into the tent... and it is like a never ending circus of aggravation... that I deal with alarmingly well.

My elder dog's whining gets me the most out of it all because it is super loud... and I can never get very far into any project around the place without said whining making me hike back across the property... to show her I am around... so that she will stop doing it. I get it that she is old, disabled and does not have the greatest sight or hearing to boot... and just wants to be near me... but fuck it drives me fucking crazy plus I wind up burning way to many calories hiking back and forth constantly.

I am sure that the neighbors think all kinds of horrible things because of her frequent whining throughout the day... but considering that none of them have inquired about it... I guess they have been drawing their own conclusions. Since this is such a tiny little community of people... I would think that by now someone would have noticed me helping my elder dog walk around each day... and 'put two and two together' but who knows!

Thankfully, there are other folks around who are living some kind of alternative lifestyle... in alternative dwellings... so me and my tent camping is not all that peculiar. That said though... I am the only person around here (that I know of) who is currently staying in a tent... which yup definitely makes me the 'weirdest of the weird' and more than likely the focus of the local gossip.

Not that it is 'here nor there' but I have been thinking about what all I can do (other than my brush wall) to give the more prying neighbors something to talk about. The main thing that I have been pondering doing is to make some of those wooden sculptures that I am fond of making... and placing them along the road just to be like: Here look at this!

Today was another long day... and I pretty much wore myself out digging a bunch of holes and shallow pools in various places along a few of the larger gulches... to continue my water finding and spring development project. For all intents and purposes, three quarters of the place could be considered to be one massive 'spring development' site... with a heck of a lot of nooks and crannies that I have yet to explore.

My main focus today was to go to a few areas that get a good bit of surface water moving through them... and see if I could find places where the water either goes below ground... or comes up from the ground. It was much more a process of 'reading the signs' (like washes and bare spots) than 'following the water' because it has not rained in quite some time now... and I am having to do a lot of observation and deduction to figure things out.

The water scenario here is just going to take time... but so far I think that with enough effort and enough time... I can probably 'tickle' some water up out of the ground somewhere here. It is just going to take continuing my efforts with digging holes and forming pools in the wet 'pinch points' and building small dams and brush piles in the more dry looking areas downhill of them.

On a different note. I have been seeing a lot of poison ivy around the place and during all my explorations (and setup) I have kind of been bulling my way through it instead of avoiding it. Given my cavalier attitude towards it during the last few weeks... I now have a good bit of a reaction to it on my hands, calves and even around my ankles.

Somehow I have avoided getting the stuff in my eyes... but I am thinking that tomorrow I am going to use some of the rainwater that I have collected... along with some bleach... to scrub all the affected areas. If nothing else I will at a bare minimum remove any remaining sap on my skin... and burn away a few layers of the skin that already has the sap sequestered in them.

Anyways, another thing that I worked on today was moving my cellular repeater from the top of the hill near the road... to near my writing tent so that using the internet was not an extremely frustrating process. I wound up having to move the antenna and the base station all over the place to make it work... but in the end I got a rather reliable signal... even though my bandwidth is not nearly as good as it was when it was on the hill.

I am unsure if I mentioned it previously but during the move the bottom of one of my carboi water jugs broke (thankfully it was riding in the trailer) and I repurposed it (on day two) into an outdoor enclosure for the repeater. It was kind of funky looking by the road because I had mounted it on a small pine tree sapling that I had topped... then covered it all in two thick black plastic bags to keep it out of the weather.

What I have been looking into doing is setting up a real outdoor enclosure in the place where the repeater used to be... and reinstalling the repeater there along with a dedicated cellular wifi hotspot. Then I want to run fiber (from the nearby stub out) to the same enclosure... so that I can broadcast it and the cellular network (as wifi) from the top of the hill.

The cellular service here is so frigging dodgy... but somehow I got super lucky and the provider I have is the only one that really works here. There are some places where the signal is atrocious... but it does work everywhere... and as long as I am either at the top of the hill... or near the repeater... I can even do voice calls.

As far as the power scenario goes I am so happy that I was able to get that two hundred amp RV pole installed... with the fifty amp four prong two hundred and twenty volt outlet. It was super easy to find all the adapters (to go from 50 amp four prong 220 volt AC to 30 amp three prong 220 volt to a single 15 amp 120 volt outlet) and a thirty foot (roughly ten meters) ten gauge extension cord.

I wound up using one adapter at the fifty amp plug... then I used the extension cord to run the power across the driveway (where there is no gravel) and at the end of the cord I used the other two adapters... which I taped together just for good measure. In the final 120 volt outlet I have a five way splitter attached... and both the splitter and the extension cord end (with the adapters) are staked up off the ground... and covered with a five gallon bucket.

Of course from there I have several other extension cords ran... and in total I think that I have power to five different areas where I have some kind of splitter in use to provide multiple outlets. None of the setup is all that different than anything that I have done before when first developing a site... but this time around running power everywhere was super straight forward.

What I like the most about the power scenario is that I have various places with some decent amperage to work with... which makes running my corded electric chainsaw way more enjoyable than say over a low amperage line. The other big upside is that I can even run my air compressor if need be... and like I said at one point in my last series... I can even run a decent sized welder.

Well, I have rambled on enough for this entry... and have used up all the words that I have in me for the day. I hope that everyone is doing well and all that feel good jazz. Ta ta for now.